The House Only Misbehaves for the Estate Agent

We love our house, and our house, we're increasingly certain, loves us — which is the only reason this is a strange story rather than a frightening one. For the eleven years we've lived here it has been nothing but warm, easy, and kind: things we lose turn up, the heating seems to anticipate the cold, the whole place has a settledness that guests always remark on. Not a hint of anything wrong. A happy house.

The trouble started only when we decided to sell it.

We're relocating for work — no choice, and no small grief about leaving. We put the house on the market, and the estate agent came to do the photos and the first viewings, and the house, which has never so much as creaked at us, declared war on him.

He got locked in the box room. The door, which has no lock, held shut for twenty minutes while he hammered on it, and then opened on its own. The temperature in the living room, mid-viewing, crashed so hard that his prospective buyers could see their breath in June, and left. On his third attempt, doing an evening viewing alone, he came out white and shaking and would not go back in, and eventually admitted, in the pub we took him to because he was too rattled to drive, that a voice had spoken close to his ear on the stairs, clear and cold, and told him to leave, and to stop bringing people. He resigned the listing the next day. The second agency we tried lasted two viewings. The third sent someone who walked in, went pale in the hall, said 'no, sorry, no,' and walked straight back out.